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Labs

Troubleshooting a DNS Zone

Understanding a service well enough to troubleshoot it is an important skill as a System Administrator. In this lab, we'll go over troubleshooting BIND zone files. This lab environment will start two linux servers, although you will only use the one labeled "Lab Server" to complete this lab. Due to security settings in the Cloud Playground, DNS resolution between nodes isn't possible in that environment. The second server, named "Practice Server" is configured only as a sandbox for students to follow along with activities from other lessons in this section since a two node lab environment is needed for some tasks.

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Labs

Path Info

Level
Clock icon Intermediate
Duration
Clock icon 15m
Published
Clock icon Aug 21, 2020

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Table of Contents

  1. Challenge

    Use /var/named/new-forward.db as a new zone file moving forward.

    The first thing we need to do is set up named to use this new zone file. Edit /etc/named.conf, find the mylabserver.com zone declaration, and change the file line.

    From:
    zone "mylabserver.com" IN {
        type master;
        file "/var/named/forward.db";
    };
    
    To:
    zone "mylabserver.com" IN {
        type master;
        file "/var/named/new-forward.db";
    };
    

    Second, we need to edit the new-forward.db zone file and make sure it's correct.

    Open it with your favorite editor and take a look.

    The first thing to notice is the domain that the file is set to SOA for. Since we're using mylaberver.com and the file contains oldcompany.edu, we need to change that in every location.

    Additionally, the IP scheme for the zone file doesn't look right - our IP scheme is 10.0.1.XX while the one in the file is 10.10.1.XX. That should be fixed as well.

    Verify the IP address of the 'A' record for dns.mylabserver.com is correct.

    Verify that all FQDNs have a . at the end.

    Once we have done all of that, we can verify that the file is correct by running:

    named-checkzone mylabserver.com /var/named/new-forward.db
    

    When we get a good result there, we can run:

    systemctl restart named
    

    Finally, we can check our work using nslookup in the next task.

  2. Challenge

    Verify that dns, test1, db1, and web3 all resolve to the correct addresses.

    Use the following commands to check what address a name resolves to:

    nslookup dns.mylabserver.com localhost
    nslookup test1.mylabserver.com localhost
    nslookup db1.mylabserver.com localhost
    nslookup web3.mylabserver.com localhost
    
    • dns.mylabserver.com should resolve to your local IP address.
    • test1.mylabserver.com should resolve to 10.0.1.30.
    • db1.mylabserver.com should resolve to 10.0.1.78.
    • web3.mylabserver.com should resolve to 10.0.1.230.

The Cloud Content team comprises subject matter experts hyper focused on services offered by the leading cloud vendors (AWS, GCP, and Azure), as well as cloud-related technologies such as Linux and DevOps. The team is thrilled to share their knowledge to help you build modern tech solutions from the ground up, secure and optimize your environments, and so much more!

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